As most of you know my wonderful wife is a very dedicated teacher. This year she took on a new position as the testing coordinator for the school and as she often does, she searches across a lot of blogs, twitter feeds and websites to gather good ideas for her school. She found a great poster on all the attributes that standardized teaching doesn’t measure and wanted it for her room.

The source document was provided and is intended for free use, but when we downloaded it, it was a .jpg file. Trying to resize it back to poster size didn’t really work as the graphics and words looked terrible. I said I would just recreate it for her. It proved to be a fun project and the final product turned out great.

As you can see the overall concept is pretty simple. Mixed fonts of text and the colored pencils in the corners. Well I could have just used any font I wanted but decided that I would replicate the original as closely as I could.

I started by creating a poster sized document 24” x 36” so I didn’t have to worry about scaling it later. I just filled it with black as the starting point. I then opened the downloaded poster that Sarah had sent me. This is where I started to take advantage of the features that Adobe introduced a few versions ago. They call them Shared Libraries and they are intended to promote portability of design features from one project to another and from device to device.

Libraries Panel

. Basically you can save colors, shapes, graphic elements, font styles, special brushes, patterns to the cloud. No longer do you have to try and figure out or remember what the color scheme was, or what typeface did that customer want to use.

I saved the reference graphic to start building my document.

Next I wanted to figure out what the various colors were on the poster. I just used the eyedropper tool and sampled each color. With that color as the new foreground color, you just click on the square icon on the libraries pane and it adds the color. Because the quality of the .jpg was what it was, there seemed to be color variations in the samples. I got them all and then just used the one I liked best.

Then it was on to figuring out what fonts were there. There are web apps and iphone apps which allow you to snap pictures of text and identify them. With the latest PS update, that capability is now resident inside the Text menu itself.

Just highlight the text you want to identify and then select the “Match Fonts” item. It will provide a prioritized list of the best fits and will also show you what fonts are available in the Adobe Type Kit, which are included in your subscription.

Because I am a fontaholic, I also use other sources such as www.DaFont.com and www.skyfonts.com . DaFont is almost all free for personal use and has a lot of specialized fonts for download. Skyfont is a paid subscription where you can buy full families of type with all of the cool bells and whistles.

Because I wanted to keep my layers in some kind of order I created a layer group for each color of text and then made separate layers for each word.

Once I created the first word in the right color, font and size for each one, I then saved that as a character style into the library. After the first word, I just had to click that with the word selected and it was done.

Character style saves the font, the color and the size info

Since all the words in each color were grouped I could adjust the font size just by selecting the group. Made the whole thing pretty easy to do.

I was pleased with the final result and much more importantly, so was Sarah.

It has been a while since we have done anything with a Photoshop tutorial.These days I spend most of my time in Lightroom working with the pictures themselves. There are things you just can’t do in that program, that still require Photoshop.One of the features that fascinates me most is the flexibility you can have in adding text to your document. This is just going to be a basic introduction to some of the control you have to get the words looking just as you want them.

First text is treated as a separate sort of layer in PS.You can transform it, add layer styles and apply all kinds of effects.

The type tool is the big T on the side menu.You have a wide range of installed fonts, which can be selected in the window on top.

Some sets of fonts have additional features which can be accessed through the character/paragraph panel.You can purchase fonts which include a variety of stylistic flourishes.If you do weddings and such they are probably a good investment.

There are several ways you can control how your text appears, beyond just selecting the basic size.

The term “kerning” is one you should learn.It controls the space between the letters.Not all characters take up the same space. You can change some of them or all of them via the panel.

A second option is to actually stretch or compress the letters.It doesn’t alter the relationship between them, just drags it out.

On the top panel you also have an option to warp your text to follow a variety of shapes.

As with everything in Photoshop, the best way to learn what these features can do, is to play with them.